Three Tongan girls (NPS Photograph) Heir to the throne is Crown Prince Tungi—named Taufaahau at birth in 1918—who has the blood of three lines of Tongan kings in his veins. So has Queen Salote herself. In the days when fables began Tongan legend says a god came down to earth by a tree so tall that it pierced the heavens. He came to visit his earthly bride. The son she bore was the first of the Tui Tonga—the Sacred Kings of Tonga.* For the material on early Tongan kings I am indebted to Dr E. E. V. Collocott, one-time Methodist Minister in Tonga, who published an article, ‘Queen Salote's Heritage’, in ‘The Fortnightly’, January, 1954. They reigned for 38 generations until 1865, but for long centuries the actual cares of government were in other hands. Of the earlier generations of Tongan Sacred Kings little is known, but they have left impressive memorials of themselves in eastern Tongatabu. Tradition tells of a king who, fearing assassination, sat with his back to a stone, while with a long staff he kept a space cleared about him. The ‘Leaning-against Stone’ still stands, and nearby is the famous but mysterious trilithon named Haamonga which, tradition again says, was set up by a king who declared he would make posterity wonder at their purpose and plan. He has had his desire. Not far away are the tombs of the early kings, huge mounds faced with terraces of stones, beautifully worked and set accurately in place. As the centuries unfolded the 1300's saw a Tongan king conquer part of Samoa and later be driven out. In the fifteenth century a Tongan king was murdered and his son embarked on a wide ocean search for the assassins, at last capturing and slaying them. Wearied of strife he kept for himself the honours and pleasures of supreme kingship, but entrusted the cares of State to a junior branch of his house, the Haa (clan) Takalaua. Henceforth there were two kings—the Sacred King (Tui Tonga) and the Ruling King (Tui Haa Takalaua), whose daughter was married to the Sacred King to bear him a successor. The Sacred and the Ruling kings were in time overshadowed by a new power arising in western Tongatabu: the head of the house of Heart-of-Upolu, Tui Kanokupolu. So high became the prestige of these western chiefs that their daughters replaced the daughters of the Ruling kings as principal wives and mothers of Sacred Kings, and by the end of the eighteenth century the Tui Kanokupolu were effective rulers of the entire Tongan group. In remarkable fashion and through all these changes the royal sanctity of the Sacred King was unimpaired and scrupulously observed by rulers and people. The spread of Christian missions, however, gradually diminished the declining influence of the Sacred Kings of Tonga, and when in 1865 the Sacred King died no successor was installed, (Continued on page 64)